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Take a ride down the iconic Route 66 in America

It was an Oklahoma entrepreneur named Cyrus Avery who came up with the notion of a highway across America that would link the Great Lakes to the Pacific Ocean. The ‘Father of Route 66’, as Avery came to be known, believed the time had come for the ‘Main Street of America’ to be.

First connecting Chicago to Los Angeles in 1926, the ‘Mother Road’, as novelist John Steinbeck called it, went on to link existing roads and give rise to oh-so-many little towns along the way that provided motels and restaurants to cater to the road-trippers across the USA.

It was a 3,863km-long highway through the heart of America. During the Great Depression, it allowed people to escape the Dust Bowl and move to California, and, when the war was over, Americans took to the road, getting their “kicks on Route 66”.

In 1984, when a new interstate system came around, Route 66 was officially decommissioned, and much of it has been bypassed or paved over. Still, preservation societies have ensured that you can still use the network to get to some of America’s most beautiful places. The Pacific beaches of Santa Monica, Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona, the Grand Canyon - getting to these will still give you your kicks on Route 66.

Be warned though: you’re likely to get lost and befuddled, you’ll find that Google Maps doesn’t always get you where you think you want to go - but part of being on Route 66 is allowing yourself to be entranced at what you find wherever you land up. You will find yourself in bars in which time has stood still, in vintage diners and motels with flickering neon lights, in greasy spoons eating massive breakfasts to mop up daily hangovers. This is a land of soda fountains and motor courts - this is retro America.

Read John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath before and after you hit the road. Set during the Dust Bowl years, this is the classic Route 66 novel. It will put your life before and after the journey in perspective.